Chapter Text
There was no denying that Grace Stone is the luckiest woman in the world. It had been a difficult last two years since they had received Cal’s diagnosis and life had become an unending carousel of doctor’s appointments and forms and Googling and sleepless nights in the mundane horror of your child’s creeping death.
She still lies awake some nights, staring at the ceiling as Ben sleeps lightly beside her. Cal is on the mend. Just thinking that makes something in her chest bloom, like taking a deep gulp of air after being underwater for too long. It leaves her lightheaded and dizzy and happy beyond belief.
Grace can even see it in Cal. Dr Bahl’s treatment is working a miracle. Every day her son is more energetic, even after a full day. Whereas before…Grace could not forget, even if she tried, the pallor Cal would get in the evenings, the tiredness in his eyes. It made her want to cry, seeing her little boy do his best to stay positive and happy in and out of the clinic, chemo wasting him away bit by bit. Cal was always mature beyond his years. Or that was cancer’s last gift, its last curse. Cal will always be a little boy who lived two years of his life with a death sentence over his head.
She hopes those memories will fade with time, but she still worries. Olive is of course always at his side, overjoyed that her brother is healthier and can spend more time with her. Grace knows Olive had done her best not to complain. But it was hard, the hours spent separated from her twin whenever Cal had to spend overnights at the hospital. Cancer casts a long shadow, and Grace is just happy to see it fading.
It takes several weeks before Grace fully comes to believe what Ben has told her, that he has met a doctor who could save Cal’s life. But he has. And Dr Saanvi Bahl is an angel. A miracle worker. Grace breaks down, in her office, when Dr Bahl brings the first test back and shows that the cancer is truly in remission. Ben grips her tight as she cries, and he cries as well.
It isn't until afterwards that Grace recalls also seeing tears in Dr Bahl’s eyes.
Ben meanwhile seems to have stepped off his later flight changed. He is hopeful, sweet, attentive. He takes a lot of time off work, more than he has in the last five years if Grace is honest, just to be at home with the children. Which Grace appreciates, but also, two years of medical bills and piling debt and time off to go to the doctor needs to be sorted. She works extra catering jobs almost nonstop. And she is starting to worry that Ben’s sudden lack of interest in teaching affect his chances at tenure.
Yet she cannot find it in her heart to complain to Ben, who has not stopped beaming since they have gotten back from Jamaica, peppering her with kisses every time she walks through the door, constantly playing and swinging Olive and Cal around until they are breathless from laughing so much.
She notes a similar change in Michaela. Grace knows Mick has been going through a dark time since Evie’s death. But her sister-in-law now visits more often, especially with her new boyfriend Zeke, who has taken a shine to the kids and showers them both with attention. Sometimes Grace sees Mick and Ben share a look, like they know a wonderful secret.
And Grace loves them both, she does, and she is happy, and she is so lucky. The luckiest woman in the world, with a husband who adores her, two beautiful healthy children, surrounded by family and loved ones, and…
And yet…
Grace remembers Dr Bahl’s tears one evening a few weeks later, watching her husband animatedly talk to someone she did not know on the phone. He seems to be asking about a violin concerto. She doesn’t know why she remembers the doctor’s tears in that moment. Working in paediatric oncology must be an emotional position and Grace is so relieved, so elated to know her little boy, her heart, will live to pay it much mind. But for some reason it comes to her again as she listens to Ben enthuse about one of Beethoven’s symphonies. Ben has never particularly liked classical music before, even though Grace has tried to drag him to concerts.
She asks him who was on the phone and Ben tells her it was a fellow passenger on the flight back from Jamaica, who had just performed his first concert in New York.
Grace cannot help but think that the way Ben says fellow passenger sounds more weighty than it should.
It's becoming more frequent since they came back from the holidays. At first Grace does not notice since she is swept up in the news of Cal’s recovery and in the sudden affection and attention she is receiving from Ben. They had planned the trip in Jamaica in part for a distraction for Cal and Olive, but also to see if they could try to repair the fractures that had come into their marriage since Cal’s diagnosis. In that respect the trip had been a failure, with both too stressed and too far in their own hurt to truly speak plainly or to listen. But since he’d gotten off that later plane, Ben is transformed into her loving, attentive, sweet husband again.
But she still feels there is a piece of the puzzle missing. Ben speaks all the time of other passengers on the plane, people Grace had never met and Ben had only known for a few hours yet seemed to share an intimacy that Grace does not understand. She meets Bethany, who had been a flight attendant on that flight and her wife, about a month after, when she calls asking Ben for advice on her cousin applying for colleges. A few weeks later Ben works to help another passenger, Marko, get a visa, a man Grace meets only to find that he speaks no English at all. Yet Ben greets him with the warmth of an old friend. Sometimes Mick also gets involved when Ben gets calls from ‘fellow passengers’ (that strange, loaded term) for help, using her detective badge or skills in ways that Grace suspects is less than official.
Ben is also odd sometimes with non-passengers. A few days after the flight, they have a knock on the door. Several official and serious-looking men asked to speak to Ben. Grace knows it is about the missing passengers even before they say it. It has been all over the news. No one can explain how eleven passengers managed to disappear from a flight they had clearly boarded from Montego Bay. Worse, no one can explain why no passenger seemed to know how it happened.
Grace thinks about that as she sat next to her husband, listening to the grim-eyed Agent Vance ask Ben question after question about the missing passengers. She supports her husband with all her heart, but even she can feel the shadow of doubt tug at her as he explains, for the 100th time, that he had not noticed any passengers missing, that he had been napping for the most part.
The agent tries to ask Cal some questions, but Grace puts her foot down about that. Her son is just getting his hopes up about the treatment his father seems so strangely optimistic about and Grace is not letting anyone stress her son at that point. She politely tells the agent that if Cal says anything she would let them know and then sends them on their way.
At the time she had not really thought about it, but later she reflects that Ben had also grinned like an idiot when the agent had appeared at the door. Even the agent had appeared nonplussed by the way Ben had grabbed his hand before he left, staring intensely into his eyes as he tells him that he could not imagine a better man for the job.
But none of it is as strange as watching her husband and Dr Bahl interact. Grace is not a jealous woman. She knows her husband loves her. She knows he still finds her attractive, that he is serious about trying to get pregnant again. Grace welcomes the rekindled flame in their relationship, although she is much less certain about a third child than he is.
But if she were a jealous woman, a less secure woman, Grace would find the way her husband treats their son’s doctor threatening. Their greetings are that of old friends, the way they gravitate to each other when they are in the same room makes them seem like old lovers. She asks Ben, point-blank one night after watching him lean centimetres from Dr Bahl’s face as she shows them one of Cal’s scans two months into remission.
Ben appears surprised, then concerned. “There is nothing to worry about there, Grace. You know that I love you more than anything in the world, right?”
His beautiful blue eyes are sincere and adoring and of course Grace believes him. Of course. But…
“I know, Ben, I know. You just seem…I don’t know, like you’ve known each other for a long time.”
This time Grace almost does not catch the emotion that flickers across those blue eyes. Maybe, almost, wistful?
“We just got talking because I saw she was working on oncology. And when she told me about the treatment, I was so overwhelmed that we ended up sharing a lot about our lives. But I promise you, I had not seen her before that flight.” Ben tells her. She knows he is telling the truth. It just also feels almost like a lie.
But she trusts him, and Grace is happy that he is finding friends. They had both struggled when they had learned about Cal’s diagnosis. She had dedicated most of her time to her son, giving up a lot of her own social time and catering opportunities to stay at home with Cal. She had met a few other mothers as well at the clinic, and they had bonded over the trauma, and Grace still stays in touch with them. But Ben had never been one to have many close friends, and he had fully thrown himself into trying to research any potential cure or treatment that might help Cal, that might give their son a chance, even if it meant that Ben slowly lost or strained most relationships he had. Including with her.
So, if Dr Bahl – Saanvi – was to be the one to help Ben reconnect with people, Grace is happy for it. Grace certainly could not be any more grateful to her, given her role in their son’s recovery, but she also begins to appreciate the soft-spoken doctor, her quiet compassion and stunning intellect. Saanvi begins to come over to dinner sometimes, in the months after Cal’s recovery, with her girlfriend Alex. She and Ben light up when they see each other and can spend hours excitedly discussing some new advancement in Saanvi’s research or Ben’s new passion project, a strange obsession he has developed with something he calls Noah’s sapphire. Cal often gets bored and goes to doodle in the living room, but Olive can sit listening in rapt fascination, chin in hands, for hours while Grace and Alex shared looks of bemusement. Mick also seems overjoyed the first night she comes over for dinner, hugging Saanvi like a long-lost sister. Grace occasionally catches Saanvi looking at Zeke with almost misty eyes too, as if remembering something from long-ago.
But even Mick is not as close to Saanvi as Ben, who Grace catches on more than one occasion with a hand on her back, or helping her stand, as if his unthinking instinct is to shelter her somehow. And Grace cannot deny that Saanvi is a beautiful woman, and her husband is an attractive man and that they have some kind of connection, something she cannot explain. She cannot even imagine what Alex thinks of it all.
But Grace is happy. She is so lucky. Every time she comes home, and Cal bounds over to her to show her something new he had drawn, whenever she can hear Olive and Cal’s giggles from the other room as she cooks, whenever Ben brings home sunflowers, her favourite, with a goofy grin, like he cannot believe his luck. She is so lucky.
But. Grace cannot put her finger on it. This growing sense at every turn that there is something she is missing, a big secret, as if Ben (and Mick, and Saanvi, and TJ, and Bethany, and Radd, and Amuto and all the fellow passengers that she slowly gets to know as they inexplicably became more intertwined in their lives) have this shared secret and she is on the outside.
Three months after Cal’s full remission, Grace meets even more passengers. There are two men in front of their house as she comes back from work. Grace eyes them up as she pulls the catering van into the driveway. They looked harmless enough: one man tall, lanky, Black, the other shorter, white with somewhat shifty-looking features. But maybe that is just his face and he cannot help it.
“Yes?” Grace asks as she gets out of the car. “Can I help you with something? I should warn you that I’m not in the mood to be converted this afternoon, but I can get you a drink of water if you want.”
The shorter man snorts, as if what she had said was very funny. “Oh, don’t worry lady, we’re not here to preach God’s Word. Had enough of that for a lifetime.”
Before Grace can react, the other man shakes his head. “Eagan.” He says, like a name and a warning. “We are sorry to bother you Mrs Stone, but we’re here to speak to your husband Ben. Is he home?”
“He’s out at the moment.” Grace tells them as she begins unloading her equipment from the van. The tall one immediately lends her a hand. The shorter one, Eagan, rolls his eyes and begrudgingly does the same. “Thank you. But I think he should be back soon. What is this about?”
“Oh, please don’t worry, we can come back another time if its more convenient,” The taller – politer – of the two assured her. “Just please tell Stone – Ben – that some fellow passengers stopped by –” Again, that term “—and we’d like him to consider a business opportunity with us.”
Grace is skeptical about what that meant but tells them she will pass on the message. “And your names…?”
Eagan, the smarmy one, gives her a shit-eating grin. “Tell him it was some true believers.”
The other one hushes him again. “Adrian and Eagan, Mrs. Stone. Thank you for your time.”
Grace watches them leave with bemusement. Later, when she tells Ben, he just snorts. “Oh, them. Wonder what they’ve cooked up now.”
“So, you know them as well?” Grace prods.
Ben shrugs. “We chatted in the lounge at the airport. A bit shady but I think their hearts are in the right place.”
Grace raises her eyebrows. “Well, then not a business opportunity worth taking.”
Ben nods, but she thinks it seems a little half-hearted. “I’ll chat with them, but I doubt its anything I want to get involved with.”
Grace just nods, trying to decipher again this half-husband, half-stranger before her.
Agent Vance comes back, nearly three months after his last visit. The passengers remain missing. Grace sees the Meyers, the parents of one of the missing passengers, Angelina, on the television nearly every day since. They clearly had the money and clout to make sure no-one forgets about them, but even without it, the case had gripped the country for weeks. How did eleven passengers simply vanish into thin air?
“I cannot imagine what they must be going through,” Grace comments to Ben one evening as she sits watching the news as he works through a crossword puzzle. “Losing your child like that? She seemed like a sweet girl.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Grace can see Ben freeze, pen in mid-air. She turned just in time to catch a complicated mix of emotions trip across his face. Something pained, something angry, something sad.
“Yes,” He says finally, “It must be devastating to have someone you love torn from you like that, with no warning.” Ben looks up at her, his eyes too bright, like he is holding back tears, looking at her like she was the most precious thing in the world. Like she was his salvation.
At moments like this, Grace feels she cannot breathe. It is so much. Sometimes, though she would never admit it out loud, it is too much.
She does not mention Angelina again.
But they cannot avoid the missing passengers. Grace has tried to talk to Ben about it a few times, and even asked Cal once out of curiosity, but her son had just shrugged, and Ben had been evasive. He had given her the same pat answer he had given Agent Vance. But it seemed even Agent Vance had not been convinced.
The second time Vance comes to their door, Ben is less effusive but still clearly pleased to see him. Grace can tell that even Vance is affected by the strange respect Ben clearly had for a man he had never met before in his life.
She has to get Cal and Olive to bed, so she only overhears part of their conversation, with Vance bizarrely asking Ben about his new side project on Noah’s Sapphire. Afterwards, when Vance has left, Grace asks Ben what that was about.
“Oh, he just had some follow up questions.” Ben tells her, kissing her temple as they settled into bed together.
“About your Noah’s Sapphire?”
For a moment Grace thinks Ben looks uncomfortable. “Yes, well, apparently one of the passengers has been saying some odd things about the trip, and they think there may be a connection.” He pauses. What he is saying makes no sense, but Grace can tell he is working his way to telling her something. So, she stays quiet. She is patient.
“Look, I know my behaviour since that flight has been odd, and that you probably have loads of questions and I don’t think I can answer all of them. But I think…”
Grace feels a sudden buzz of anticipation. She senses that Ben is about to be truly honest with her, not just truthful.
“The thing is, Grace, and I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but something happened on that flight. Something…something I can’t really explain. Like we all experienced this strange crazy…epiphany. All of us. And there’s parts I don’t really remember. And other parts feel like they went on for a lot longer than they did.”
Grace stares at her husband, trying to be supportive and understanding but feeling like they are slipping away from her. “An epiphany? Do you mean…like a religious experience?”
Ben winces. Grace feels bad. Her tone maybe had been too incredulous. Too harsh. But she was not a religious woman. And she had not thought her husband was a particularly religious man either.
“I don’t mean a Come to Jesus moment or anything.” Ben tried again. “I just mean, it was…something special. Like…like I had a chance to live this whole other life, one where things turned out…much differently. And then when I realised that I was back here, that I had a chance to turn things around, to do things right, it was like the most blistering clarity you could imagine.”
Grace is struggling. “It sounds….it sounds very intense Ben. So, you think you all went…you all went through this mass…epiphany…together?”
“Yes,” Ben answers. “Yes, I think so. It really brought us together.”
That would explain the closeness, Grace thought, why the word passenger was used like a badge of honour. Well, it would explain part of it. It didn’t explain how Ben seemed to know so many intimidate details in all these peoples’ lives, why he and Saanvi moved around each other like people who had been near each other for years, communicating without words, constant soft brushes or looks. Grace feels ill for a moment. She would almost have preferred if Ben had had an affair with the doctor. Somehow this, knowing they shared this moment of religious transcendence, is worse.
“But what does that have to do with the sapphire?” Grace asks, now mostly to distract herself from that gnawing insecurity.
Ben looks away. “It was just…something that came to me in that moment. I didn’t think about once I was off the plane, I was just so happy to see you and Mom and Dad. But then, I kept thinking about it, and Saanvi mentioned it –“ Grace ignores the twist in her chest at the affectionate way Ben says her name. She was not a jealous woman. “And then I decided to a bit of research and then it just grew.”
“So, Saanvi also had this…epiphany about a sapphire?” Grace asks instead, trying to unravel these threads. The more he tries to explain, the muddier it all feels.
“Yes, I think so…I’m sorry I’m not explaining it well. It was like we all had this dream about our lives, and we all dreamed about the sapphire and then we were back.”
Clear as mud. Grace is not a religious person, though she would count herself as spiritual. A single epiphany she could understand, perhaps a shared experience of wonder by a group of strangers. But to all share in the same collective dream, about a sapphire no less? She is trying to understand her husband, but she is struggling. “But what does a sapphire have to do with the disappearance of all the missing passengers?”
Ben gazes at her with his beautiful blue eyes. “I don’t know.” He answers. And Grace feels the sting of it, of knowing that for the first time since he stepped off that plane, her husband has lied to her.
It gets worse. Ben seems relieved to have told her about his experience, as if it explained all the odd behaviour and strange relationships with the ‘fellow passengers’ but all Grace can feel is the growing confusion it provoked.
She tries to focus on the positives. Cal is improving by leaps and bounds, finally able to catch up on all the schooling he had missed because of his illness, and soon back in class with his sister. Olive is on a massive mythology kick now, after hearing her father talk about the sapphire, and Grace and Ben are increasingly ferrying their daughter to the local library to get a growing pile of books on almost every world religion.
Her catering job is going well. Their new supplier, Danny, has been a huge help in sourcing some excellent quality and very affordable wholesale vegetables. She likes spending time with Danny. He is an easy-going man, kind and funny. It also doesn’t hurt that he is very easy on the eyes, but Grace knows that she would never cheat on her husband. If Ben could be close to Saanvi, she could enjoy laughing at Danny’s jokes once in a while.
Ben does not appear as involved in his work. His time increasingly seems to be spent with the kids, his side project on Noah’s Sapphire, which Vance appears to take an interest in, leading to many more run-ins with the agent, and Ben’s constant communication with fellow passengers. Ben seems to be in some strange way, their first port of call whenever they had problems. And Grace knows that Ben would step back from it if she asked him to. But she knows her husband. And Ben thrives in that kind of position. Sometimes Grace had thought that academia, however bookish her husband could be, was not the right fit for Ben.
Her own work is so busy that she can barely keep up with all the new goings on and intrigues in Ben’s new world, though he does try to fill her in. But Grace often gets back after ten hours of food prep and organising and serving and cleaning up, and his complex explanations, with theological references and long scientific terms she knows Saanvi has provided him, make her head hurt.
Ben, of course, realises that she is working hard, and does his best to make her life easy for her. He takes over many of the childcare responsibilities, keeps the house clean, cooks most nights when the last thing Grace wants to do is look at a chopping board.
But then one night Saanvi shows up at their doorstep, face haggard and tear streaked. Alarmed, Grace ushers her in, sits her down. Ben hurries down the stairs the moment he heard Saanvi’s voice. Grace offers to make tea, though it is mostly an excuse to hide in the kitchen so she does not have to see the concern on Ben’s face, the intensity with which he gazes at the doctor as she sits on their sofa explaining that she and Alex have broken up.
“It’s so hard, Ben,” Grace overhears Saanvi say as she is about to walk back into the living room with a cup of hot chamomile tea. She hesitates and lingers behind the corner. A part of her is ashamed at this attempt at eavesdropping, but she is too curious to resist.
“Saanvi, it’s okay. It’s okay.” Her husband is so achingly sweet, so emotional in his concern, that it almost breaks Grace’s heart. “It will get better.”
“Does it?” Grace wonders if Saanvi has had a drink before coming to their door, or if her grief is causing her to be more open than usual. “I know you have what you always wanted, what you fought for. I’m so happy for you, for Grace, and Cal, and Olive. You’ve got it Ben, the perfect family. But I’m…I thought she was maybe the one. I held on to that. It was one of the things, the idea of it, the hope of it, that helped get me through all that. And now, here, we have our second chance, our chance at true happiness, at doing it all right, and I just keep messing up.”
This time Grace’s heart does break a little. Saanvi is so kind, so driven and compassionate with her work and trying to help people, always sweet with Cal and encouraging Olive’s curiosity. She deserves her happiness.
“You’re not messing up.” Ben’s voice is almost tender. “You are living. And part of that living is heartbreak and pain, but it will go away in time. You will meet your person. You will find love.”
“I don’t know how you do it Ben. I think Alex and I…we had a lot of problems anyway, but God the secrets. I felt like I was living half a life, like I still have one foot back there, back on that plane…” Saanvi trails off into a half-sob, half-hiccup.
Grace edges around the corner to see her husband put his hand to Saanvi’s cheek, cradling her face in a gesture so intimate that Grace feels like an intruder. She clears her throat and Ben jumps away as Saanvi looks up, too lost in her sadness to consider what that scene would look like to anyone watching. But Grace does not miss the flicker of guilt in Ben’s eyes.
That is new. And somehow, that hurts even more.
She runs into Mick the next day when she’s on her way to the store. Mick is mid-run but stops to chat with Grace. Her detective skills must have kicked in, or something in Grace’s expression gives it away, because her sister-in-law suddenly asks if she wants to grab a coffee.
Grace feels bad sharing some of her concerns with Michaela. After all, she is Ben’s sister, and she has also been different since getting off that plane. But whereas Ben seems to have thrown himself into their family with a devotion that borders sometimes on fixation, Mick seems lighter, happier, more at ease with herself.
“Ben told me that you went through a…a shared experience on the plane.” Grace tries.
Mick examines her coffee. “Yes. I guess you could call it that. It was intense.”
“Like you lived another life, another possible life?”
Her sister-in-law smiles a bit. “It was something like that. It felt like…like an opportunity to make better choices. To be better people.”
Grace nods, unsure of how to phrase this. “It feels like you all had this, this shared moment. And it’s brought you all together but also sometimes…sometimes I guess I feel a little on the outside.” Mick just nods, her blue eyes (so like her brother) sharp and focused on Grace. “I don’t know. I hear you two talking about fellow passengers, or I see how Ben is with Saanvi and…”
“There’s nothing to worry about there.” Mick interrupts. “You know that right?” Her gaze is insistent. “Ben loves you more than anything in the world.”
“I know.” Grace says. And she does know. But what she does not say is: I am not sure that love is enough.